All items listed and reviewed are available for purchase directly from Brickbat Books, although quantities are limited. Brickbat Books is located at 709 South Fourth Street, in the heart of Fabric Row, in Philadelphia.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

NEW ARRIVALS: Comix

I Shall Destroy All the Civilized PlanetsFletcher HanksPaperback, $19.95

Welcome to the bizarre world of Fletcher Hanks, Super Wizard of the inkwell. Fletcher Hanks worked for only a few years in the earliest days of the comic book industry (1939-1941). Because he worked in a gutter medium for second-rate publishers on third-rate characters his work has been largely forgotten. But among aficionados he is legendary. Hanks drew in a variety of genres depicting science-fiction saviors, white women of the jungle, and he-man loggers. Cartoonist Paul Karasik (co-adapter of Paul Auster's City of Glass and co-author of The Ride Together, a Memoir of Autism in the Family) has spent years tracking down these obscure and hard to find stories buried in the back of long-forgotten comic book titles. Karasik has also uncovered a dark secret: why Hanks disappeared from the comics scene. This book collects 15 of his best stories in one volume followed by an Afterword which solves the mystery of "Whatever Happened to Fletcher Hanks," the mysterious cartoonist who created a hailstorm of tales of brutal retribution... and then mysteriously vanished.

"[The] recovery from oblivion of these treasures is in itself a major work of art." – Kurt Vonnegut

"Raw, powerful stuff. I'm glad to see a book like this. Fletcher Hanks was a twisted dude." – R. Crumb

"Hanks is a wild card original who very nearly slipped through the cracks of art history. To those among us who spend years sifting through the cultural chaff looking for those tiny flecks of art gold, this book is truly a miraculous dream come true." – Kim Deitch

"Fletcher Hanks was this old guy back in the old days who made magic jellybeans. The magic jellybeans looked like comics, but they were magic jellybeans." – Gary Panter

"Fletcher Hanks couldn't draw much or write hardly at all. So he turned his crude and primitive quasi-gifts into a comic-art style that made a strong impression on kids like me back in the 1940s. It's a pleasure to see this first published edition of his puzzlingly effective work doing what early comic books were supposed to do: making up a new set of rules for a new kind of art form and almost getting away with it." – Jules Feiffer

"There is something cracked here. The feeling is that of a third grader in the back row drawing unbelievably complex destructo-machines while inside of him a grown man boils with hate and rage: Kill them all! And where did those jaws come from?" – Greil Marcus

The Book Of GenesisR. CrumbHardcover, $24.95

"Envisioning the first book of the bible like no one before him, R. Crumb, the legendary illustrator, reveals here the story of Genesis in a profoundly honest and deeply moving way. Originally thinking that we would do a take off of Adam and Eve, Crumb became so fascinated by the Bible’s language, “a text so great and so strange that it lends itself readily to graphic depictions,” that he decided instead to do a literal interpretation using the text word for word in a version primarily assembled from the translations of Robert Alter and the King James bible."

Volumes Two and Three (Volume One has not been published yet) of the hardcover limited edition Complete Sunday Strips. Designed by Chris Ware.

Melvin MonsterJohn StanleyHardcover, $19.95

"John Stanley is celebrated as one of the great children’s comics writers for his work on the Little Lulu series. In fact, the Lulu work is a small part of his output, he had drawn and continued to write many other comics—notably his work on the 1960s teen comics from Dell (Thirteen, Dunc and Loo, and Kookie) and his monster comedy strip Melvin Monster. D+Q is planning on launching an extensive reprinting of much of this work in discrete volumes. Our first Stanley reprint will be the three-volume Melvin Monster collection featuring all nine issues of the oddball monster boy who just wants to be good, go to school, and do as he’s told. Designed to fit nicely with our current reprinting of Tove Jansson’s Moomin series, these comics are great reading for children or comics history-minded adults. Stanley’s reputation as a great storyteller and visual comedian is richly deserved—few golden- or silver-age comics stand the test of time the way these comics do."

Poem StripDino BuzzatiPaperback, $14.95

"There's a certain street--via Saterna--in the middle of Milan that just doesn't show up on maps of the city. Orfi, a wildly successful young singer, lives there, and it's there that one night he sees his gorgeous girlfriend Eura disappear, "like a spirit," through a little door in the high wall that surrounds a mysterious mansion across the way. Where has Eura gone? Orfi will have to venture with his guitar across the borders of life and death to find out.Featuring the Ashen Princess, the Line Inspector, trainloads of Devils, Trudy, Valentina, and the Talking Jacket, "Poem Strip"--a pathbreaking graphic novel from the 1960s--is a dark and alluring investigation into mysteries of love, lust, sex, and death by Dino Buzzati, a master of the Italian avant-garde."

Panter's long-awaited new work is a gigantic (12" x 17 1/4") hardcover which re-imagines his cult hero Jimbo as the protagonist in Dante's most famous work! After years of comparing Dante and Boccaccio to find commonalities between the two, Panter developed a narrative of his own that includes literary and pop references regularly injected throughout the captions of the reinterpreted cantos. Presented in a huge oversized hardcover format (even bigger than the classic RAW!) to do justice to Panter's densely packed pages, with a stunning two-color stamping on the cloth covers, Jimbo in Purgatory is an art object, a brilliant literary game, a visual feast, and the most eye-popping, visually and verbally challenging, and memorable new graphic novel of the year. Special Limited Edition of 400, includes signed and numbered woodblock print (pictured) by Gary Panter.

"Panter's most sustained and intense visual effort ever. When I saw it, I broke out into the cold sweat that real art can bring on." – Art Spiegelman

Jimbo's InfernoGary PanterHardcover, $29.95

"Don't try to pass a pop quiz on Dante's Hell based on a reading of this comic," warns Gary Panter. "It won't work. Even though the comic is engorged with Dante's Hell and though Jimbo mouths a super-condensed version of what happens in The Inferno, canto by canto, characters are fused, actions inverted, parodied, subject to mutation by my odd memories and obsessions and whims..." That said, Jimbo's Inferno is the hugely anticipated sequel (or prequel, as it was actually completed first) to Jimbo In Purgatory. In this oversize hardcover cloth-and-gold-finished volume, produced to the same exacting standards as 2004's Purgatory, Jimbo, accompanied by his trusty guide and ride Valise, visits Hell (here envisioned as a gigantic subterranean shopping mall called Focky Bocky), and in so doing runs across minotaurs, drug-addled punkettes, UFOs, giant robots, and more, leading him to such profound questions as, "Why do so many recreational activities involve smoke and heat?" Panter's Albrecht Dürer-meets-Jack Kirby graphics are wilder and more hallucinatory than ever, and given the full, expansive treatment they so richly deserve.

Winner, 2007 American Book Award

Be a Nose!Art SpiegelmanThree Hardcovers bound together with an elastic band, $29.00

"Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus, creator of Wacky Packs and the Garbage Pail Kids, and father of the modern graphic novel (though he's still demanding a blood test), presents this warts-and-all reproduction of his private sketchbooks -- and the results are as candid, sharp, and funny as the relentlessly innovative man behind them. "Be a Nose!" is a rare glimpse into the secret scribblings of an American original."

An Alphabetical Ballad of CarnalityDavid SandlinHardcover, $14.95

"This ABC for sinners spotlights creator David Sandlin's alter ego, recounting his lurid life in rhyming couplets: a "sintamental education" in 26 easy steps, from Adultery to Zealotry. This is the fifth Blab storybook, a series showcasing sequential artists from Monte Beauchamp's annual Blab anthology. Sandlin's storybook composes what can best be described as narrative painting, taking advantage of the way in which painting (art) allows the artist to bring together the conscious and the subconscious, the rational and the irrational, the realistic and the dreamlike."

Sex, Rock & Optical Illusions

The Last Lonely SaturdayJordan CraneHardcover, $8.00

Jordan Crane's first self-published graphic novel is now available in a new edition from Fantagraphics! Largely wordless and cunningly rendered, this little book is sure to touch most folks. In The Last Lonely Saturday, an older man sits at his kitchen table, filled with melancholy. Dishes are piled up in the sink, a full pot of coffee burns on the counter; it's a quiet scene of existential despair. It quickly becomes clear that the man is a widower, and today is the day to visit his departed wife's gravesite. Little does he know that what the day holds for him will result in this being his last lonely Saturday. Both sweet and bitter, realistic and fantastic, The Last Lonely Saturday is an evocative, romantic novella, told in a beautiful two-color, red and yellow palette. His economical images waste not a line, and his narrative flows effortlessly from panel to panel in this heartwarming story of love and love lost.

Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin MaryJustin GreenHardcover, $29.00

"A lost classic of underground cartooning, Binky Brown Meets the Holy VirginMary is Justin Green's autobiographical portrayal of his struggle withreligion and his own neuroses. Binky Brown is a young Catholic battling allthe usual problems of adolescence--puberty, parents, and the fear that thestrange ray of energy emanating from his private parts will strike a pictureof the Virgin Mary. Deeply confessional, with artwork that veers wildlybetween formalist and hallucinogenic, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Maryis the controversial masterpiece that invented the autobiographical graphicnovel."